Related papers: Sensory Regimes of Effective Distributed Searching…
Living in groups brings benefits to many animals, such as a protection against predators and an improved capacity for sensing and making decisions while searching for resources in uncertain environments. A body of studies has shown how…
How do social animals make effective decisions in the absence of a leader? While coordination can improve accuracy, it also introduces delays as information propagates through the group. In changing environments, these delays can outweigh…
Collective sensing is an emergent phenomenon which enables individuals to estimate a hidden property of the environment through the observation of social interactions. Previous work on collective sensing shows that gregarious individuals…
Thanks to recent technological advances, it is now possible to track with an unprecedented precision and for long periods of time the movement patterns of many living organisms in their habitat. The increasing amount of data available on…
A standard belief on emerging collective behavior is that it emerges from simple individual rules. Most of the mathematical research on such collective behavior starts from imperative individual rules, like always go to the center. But how…
Classic computational models of collective motion suggest that simple local averaging rules can promote many observed group level patterns. Recent studies, however, suggest that rules simpler than local averaging may be at play in real…
For group-living animals, reaching consensus to stay cohesive is crucial for their fitness, particularly when collective motion starts and stops. Understanding the decision-making at individual and collective levels upon sudden disturbances…
In order to keep their cohesiveness during locomotion gregarious animals must make collective decisions. Many species boast complex societies with multiple levels of communities. A common case is when two dominant levels exist, one…
Swarm dynamics is the study of collections of agents that interact with one another without central control. In natural systems, insects, birds, fish and other large mammals function in larger units to increase the overall fitness of the…
Previous human foraging experiments have shown that human groups routinely undermatch environmental resources much like other animal species. In this experiment, we test whether humans also selectively rely on others as information sources…
Animals foraging alone are hypothesized to optimize the encounter rates with resources through L\'evy walks. However, the issue of how the interactions between multiple foragers influence their search efficiency is still not completely…
In collective motion, perceptually-limited individuals move in an ordered manner, without centralized control. The perception of each individual is highly localized, as is its ability to interact with others. While natural collective motion…
How do groups of individuals achieve consensus in movement decisions? Do individuals follow their friends, the one predetermined leader, or whomever just happens to be nearby? To address these questions computationally, we formalize…
Animal groups collaborate with one another throughout their lives to better comprehend their surroundings. Here, we try to model, using continuous random walks, how the entire process of birth, reproduction, and death might impact the…
Collective behaviour is a widespread phenomenon in biology, cutting through a huge span of scales, from cell colonies up to bird flocks and fish schools. The most prominent trait of collective behaviour is the emergence of global order:…
Theoretical models of populations and swarms typically start with the assumption that the motion of agents is governed by the local stimuli. However, an intelligent agent, with some understanding of the laws that govern its habitat, can…
In this article we provide a systematic experimental method for sorting animals according to socially relevant traits, without assaying them or even tagging them individually. Instead, they are repeatedly subjected to behavioural assays in…
Populations of mobile and communicating agents describe a vast array of technological and natural systems, ranging from sensor networks to animal groups. Here, we investigate how a group-level agreement may emerge in the continuously…
Several models of flocking have been promoted based on simulations with qualitatively naturalistic behavior. In this paper we provide the first direct application of computational modeling methods to infer flocking behavior from…
Popular hypotheses about the origins of collective adaptation are related to two basic behaviours: protection from predators and a combined search for food resources. Among the anti-predator explanations, the predator confusion hypothesis…